As an increasing number of applications and services are being made available over networks such as the Internet, an increasing number of content, application, and/or service providers are turning to technologies such as cloud computing. Cloud computing, in general, is an approach to providing access to electronic resources through services, such as Web services, where the hardware and/or software used to support those services is dynamically scalable to meet the needs of the services at any given time. A user or customer typically will rent, lease, or otherwise pay for access to resources through the cloud, and thus does not have to purchase and maintain the hardware and/or software to provide access to these resources.
It might be the case, however, that a customer will have applications that relate to, or utilize, sensitive data, such that the customer will not want the provider of the resources to have access to the information, or the provider may in fact be legally prevented from having access to the data. Conventional cloud management approaches thus cannot be utilized as the persons, resources, and applications typically responsible for managing the resources in a restricted zone will not have direct access to any of the resources in that restricted zone. Further, conventional approaches to sending management requests to the resources in that zone cannot be utilized as certain names, structures, or conventions used in the restricted zone will be undiscoverable outside that zone, such that complete and accurate instructions cannot be provided. The people inside the restricted zone also typically will not have the knowledge and/or information needed to properly operate and update the resources of the provider from within the restricted zone.